The Booker Prize’s judges, who are led by the historian Maya Jasanoff, were unequivocal in believing the novel deserved a place on the prize’s 13-strong longlist.
The list also includes Maggie Shipstead’s “Great Circle,” about a woman who devotes her life to flying and an actress set to play her onscreen, and Francis Spufford’s “Light Perpetual,” which follows the lives of five children after they are caught up in a World War II bombing raid.
Several of the nominees have a focus on race, such as Damon Galgut’s “The Promise,” about a white family in post-apartheid South Africa, and Nadifa Mohamed’s “The Fortune Men,” in which a miscarriage of justice in 1950s Wales sees a British-Somali man hanged for the murder of a white shopkeeper.
All the books have “important things to say about the nature of community, from the tiny and secluded to the unmeasurable expanse of cyberspace,” Jasanoff said in the news release.
The judges will now reread the 13 books before cutting them down to a six-strong shortlist to be announced on Sept.